It was bad enough that I just had to get out of the house. One of the things about being eternally unemployed is that I can go a week without much reason to ever leave the apartment. I have no money to spend, so going out to eat isn't happening, and I can only justify paying for coffee if I've got reviews to write (which I really have to do over at Starbucks), so unless there's a NEED for me to head out, it's only going to depress me. However, I noticed that Staples had a sale on file storage boxes (which I needed for a couple of things here), so I ordered those on-line for in-store pick-up.I also was running low on razors, shampoo, and toothpaste, so I figured I'd combine this with a trip to the dollar store, which was somewhat challenging. Needless to say, I wanted to get the full round-trip done on a single CTA fare, and I knew I didn't want to be schlepping the boxes any more than I had to, so I walked over to the Red Line (starting the timer on the transfers at 2:27pm), took that up to Belmont to catch the Brown Line. We must have just missed the previous Brown Line, as between Armitage, Diversey, and Wellington, I only saw one person waiting as we passed ... yet no train at Belmont ... so I lost 10 minutes there. Eventually the Brown Line showed, and I took that up to Western, and the Dollar Tree a block up from the station there. I sort of wanted to get some food there, but didn't want to take the time, so I collected what was on my list (plus a couple of items), and headed back to the El. Frustratingly, my train showed up when I was about 3/4 of the way up the escalator, and was heading out of the station before I got to the platform. Delete another 5-10 minutes.
This was an unusual trip, as I almost never take the Brown Line down to the Loop, but the Staples is just down the block from the Randolph/Wabash stop, so I took the Brown Line most of the way around. Fortunately, it was pretty quick just picking up the order, however they didn't have any bags big enough, or stick-on handles, so I was having to wrestle the package of boxes the three blocks over to the #36 stop. Time was getting short, and I almost got on the #22 (even though this would have required a few more blocks' walk with the boxes), but managed to get on the #36 with a whopping four minutes left on the transfer.
It's a sad thing that saving two bucks is a major financial victory in my life.
I was back to wondering if I had really DIED back in the 1993 car crash and my "life" since then has simply been some twisted manifestation of Hell ... because so damn much stuff has been horrible unendingly that if it was "natural" I would have caught some sort of a break in here at some point ... but nooooooooo ...
